I invested £100 into company shares – but when it was taken over I couldn’t believe how much I made back
A WOMAN who invested £100 in the company she worked for made a small fortune when it was taken over.
The lady, only known as Isabelle, worked for the French fashion company La Redoute and stumped up the money in 2014 to benefit from the company’s share ownership scheme.
She told Le Parisien: “I said to myself, if it goes well, so much the better and if it breaks, too bad.”
It certainly went well for her and she pocketed a sizeable €80,000 (£71,000) in December last year when the company was bought by Galeries Lafayette.
Some 1,500 La Redoute employees had become shareholders in the company and they benefitted, collectively, to the tune of €100m (£88.8m).
That’s a return of roughly a thousand times their initial investment.
Isabelle said: “I thought I had won €10,000 and I was very happy.
“But I wasn’t looking at the right statement line. It was a surprise when they told me that I already had €80,000.”
While though employees could only invest a maximum of €160 (£142) the company’s executives were not limited to how much they could put in, according to La Voix du Nord.
As with any financial investment though, the investor is not guaranteed a profit on their money and could, in some situations, lose the entire lot.
Isabelle said she wanted to some of the money towards a dream holiday in Japan.
She also wants to invest “in bricks” in preparation for her retirement.
Isabelle added: “It’s a chance to have been able to invest in your business, not everyone is so lucky.”
According to the French Directorate for Research, Studies and Statistics, in 2020 1.3 per cent of French companies with 10 employees or more had set up an employee share ownership scheme and 600,000 people benefited from it.
La Redoute was sold for a symbolic €1 in 2014 by the Kering group to the two managers at the time, Nathalie Balla and Éric Courteille.
The new managers set up a company mutual fund with its employees owning 49 per cent of all the shares.
Galeries Lafayette acquired 51 per cent of the company in 2018 and bought up the rest of the shares in December last year.
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